In Suffering, Love
Rethinking the Problem of Evil
I’ve done my best to avoid suffering, and I am more fortunate than some that my life circumstances have made it mostly possible to do so. Nevertheless, I only need to look around my west Provo neighborhood or listen to what is said in testimony meeting to see it. Some people suffer horribly, whether from war, poverty, and famine, from loneliness or disease, from betrayal by someone beloved or the death of a person close to them—any of a hundred things. None of us has escaped suffering; some have endured it intensely. What have we done with it? What ought we to do with suffering?
It is no surprise that, in the midst of suffering, we ask “Why?” As the book of Job attests, that question is hardly new.1 It seems to be a natural response even for unbelievers. But we no longer think about the question in the same way we once did. For about 1600 years, Christian thinkers didn’t ask the philosophical/theological question about the origin of evil and suffering. They knew the answers: they are a consequence of sin, a test of our faithfulness, a mystery to be answered hereafter. Augustine, Aquinas, and others said things about the causes of suffering, but the general view was that suffering has a divine purpose, whether or not God’s purpose can be understood.
For the most part, the question of how to square the character of God with human suffering rarely arose for early Christian thinkers. Evil, the cause of suffering, was generally understood to be the consequence of the unavoidable imperfection of the material world and human fallenness. Evil was not something in itself, but the absence of good, they said, and only God is perfectly good. For medieval thinkers, how to respond to the imperfections of the created world, including sin, was an important question, but what causes suffering was less so.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, theologians and philosophers formulated the question about suffering differently: How could a fully good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God allow it? On one side of the discussion were those such as G. W. F. Leibniz, who invented the term “theodicy” to describe the rational attempt to reconcile evil and suffering with the omniscient and omnipotent God of Christianity. Leibniz’s answer? The world humans inhabit is the best of all possible combinations of good and evil; “the best of all possible worlds.”2 Any less evil would create a less optimal world. Voltaire’s satire Candide is probably the most common response: In the face of real suffering, the response “all is for the best” is absurd; no empathetic person can take it seriously.
On the other side were those such as David Hume, who argued that the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence ascribed to God are logically incompatible with the existence of evil and suffering, so we should be skeptical of the existence of such a God. Religious thinkers have responded to Hume’s position in a variety of ways, but I know of none that has been entirely successful. Perhaps that is why his configuration of the problem has been central to many arguments about religion during the last three hundred years. Perhaps that is why thinking about the problem in Hume’s terms has generated faith crises for so many and, sometimes, a shift toward atheism.
Unlike many philosophical and theological conundrums, the question of suffering is rarely a merely intellectual exercise. It is often quite personal, especially for believers who find the contradictions inherent in God’s infinite goodness, knowledge, and power, on the one hand, and human suffering on the other, impossible to reconcile.
But Joseph Smith’s teachings give a different way of thinking about theodicy by portraying God as an embodied being among other co-eternal beings, a being who makes covenant with his children in order to bring them to be part of his family.3 Smith’s teachings imply that, though God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, in Smith’s teachings, none of those terms mean exactly the same as they do for the rest of the Christian theological tradition.
Since B. H. Roberts,4 a number of Latter-day Saint thinkers have argued that Smith’s teachings seem to remove the logical incompatibility to which Hume pointed by making it impossible for God to prevent all suffering. That changes the field of discussion considerably. But even with that new vision of God’s character, Smith’s teachings do not resolve the question of suffering’s origin (“agency” is an answer hiding a mystery, for example). Nor do they explain why some suffer so much more than others (it cannot be merely a matter of what they need or deserve). As Voltaire argues, any answer to the question of suffering must go beyond saying, “In the long run, you will see that this was good for you.” For that answer implicitly says, “In the long run, you will see that, all things considered, you didn’t really suffer.”
Any answer to the question of suffering must acknowledge suffering’s reality and so, also, evil’s actuality. It must acknowledge “that some people are too beaten down to be able to decide for themselves how they will respond to their own pain, that some situations are not brightened by optimistic encouragement, and that some pain destroys without redeeming.”5 Even given Smith’s teachings, it appears that no theological answer so far can do that; no answer can acknowledge the reality of evil and the suffering it causes rather than merely find a way, supposedly, to accommodate them to God’s plans and purposes.
But what if the question of suffering’s origin and purpose is a distraction from the real question? Presumably taking his cue from the book of Job, I recall Charles Randall Paul once asking, “Is it possible that the very act of formulating the problem of theodicy is, from a religious point of view, a problem—not a philosophical problem, but a faith problem?” Writers of scripture certainly ignored the question. Indeed, the book of Job makes a point of ignoring it; Job’s friends, who insist that they have the answer, are condemned for their impertinence. Why do we feel the need to take up the problem of explaining evil when, for several thousand years, other believers did not? Is it a distraction from what we really ought to be about? I think so.
The danger of being distracted by the problem of evil and suffering is implicit in the endeavor itself. We see this in the answer that, in the long run, a person’s suffering will turn out to have been good for them. Similarly, being able to satisfactorily answer the problem as posed by Hume would ultimately mean erasing suffering rationally. That may seem strange to say, but consider: Implicitly, each attempt to rationally answer the question “Why?” is an attempt to show how the existence of evil can be reconciled with God’s existence and our own. It is an attempt to integrate the existence of evil with the existence of all that is, creating a rational whole of them by making sense of their coexistence.
But it is evil to make sense of evil. Evil and suffering do not make sense. Their existence cannot be reconciled with what is good. It is evil to make a place in the world for them, to explain them, to tame them, to no longer be horrified by them.
To be sure, Hannah Arendt is right when she argues that most evil is banal, rather than like the obviously horrific monsters of film.6 That does not mean we should be less horrified by it; we must not overlook the genuine suffering caused by evil in banal guises, such as self-preservation or hidebound obedience, even when that suffering is not the Holocaust. We cannot absolve ourselves of dealing with ordinary daily suffering by strategically immersing ourselves in our horror at the monumentally tragic.
We should not allow ourselves to be distracted from our response to suffering by trying to make sense of evil and suffering philosophically and theologically. If they make sense, even a perverted sense, then they have a place in the grand scheme of things. Evil and suffering are a disruption of the proper order of things, so they cannot be made part of that order. If reason allows us to find a place for them, then they become part of the proper order and no longer its irrational disruption. When we understand them that way, we cease or at least attenuate our struggle against them, for we have found their proper place.
As a result, while supposedly trying to solve the problem of evil and suffering, reason can take us on a detour away from the question of how to imitate the love of God. The proper question for us is “How do I respond to suffering?” rather than “Why is there suffering?” Premodern thinkers assumed that they knew why we suffer and focused on how to respond to that suffering. Modern thinkers began by acknowledging that they didn’t know why we suffer and focused on how to resolve that ignorance. Joseph Smith’s teachings suggest that ultimately we do not know why there is evil, though we know it produces suffering. But if the question about the origin of evil and suffering has no answer, then his teaching should return us to the question of how we respond to them.
Charles Randall Paul was right; the real problem is a faith problem rather than a rational one. The faith needed is not trust that, in the end, all our suffering will have been for some unknown but foreordained good. Instead, faith in God is a trust that, in spite of our suffering, he can bring us (and anyone else who desires to do so) to live with him. Trying to tame suffering by making it something explicable tempts us to forget that God himself lives in a world where there is suffering. Suffering and evil disrupt the good, but he responds by repairing the breaks they create.7 Our response should be the same—action rather than explanation. If we take the detour away from “How should I respond?” toward “Why has this happened?” we move away from the demand to trust that the imitation of Jesus will bring us together in a community of transformed individuals, overcoming suffering not by making it no longer possible, but by bringing together those who will repair and no longer cause suffering.
To encounter suffering is to be called to do good without regard to the origin of suffering. As Christian theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann emphasized in the twentieth century, the trust of all Christians is that by responding to suffering in love, in imitation of Jesus, we can be recreated by the Father, made into new beings. The God of scripture, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, is a being who suffers with us, weak and vulnerable even when he has all the power there is. The human and then resurrected Jesus is the same God we see in all of scripture. Unlike the god of the philosophers, he is not a god who refuses to answer our cries, a god who, because he has a pure theoretical view of the perfect essences, has the answers to our theological conundrums but remains silent. Too often, however, when we think of God and our suffering, we do so in philosophical rather than scriptural terms. We forget that our God is who he is because he cares8—though, as Sam Brown reminds us, “It hurts to love us.”
Given Joseph Smith’s revelations about the nature of God, persons, and the all-that-is, it seems likely that suffering and evil are inescapably aspects of all-that-is. There is no being without the possibility of suffering. Famously for Latter-day Saints, God himself suffers, and not only during his life on earth (Moses 7:28). Yet, even if suffering is inescapable and ultimately inexplicable, trusting in God means trusting that he has the power and ability to save us from sin and the resulting physical and spiritual death, whatever our suffering. God has the power to transform us into something new, to do everything he has said he will do (Alma 12:15). That means recognizing that there has been and will be evil and suffering and that we have been called to work with God by responding to them with love to repair this world and create a new world, called Zion—perhaps not a community of eternal bliss but certainly a community of love.
James Faulconer is a retired professor of philosophy and senior researcher at the Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University. His area of specialty in philosophy is 20th- and 21st-century European philosophy. His most recent work has been in Latter-day Saint theologies.
Art by Deborah R. Morris.
This essay appeared in Wayfare issue 6.
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Romantic Prophecy
In 1823, the philosopher scientist Thomas Dick complained that he heard many preachers say from the pulpit, “There never was, nor ever will be, through all the ages of eternity so wonderful a display of the Divine glory, as in the cross of Christ.”
FICTION
POETRY
OLD TESTAMENT
WAYPOINTS
For example, Job 7:20.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy (1710).
See David L. Paulsen, “Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil,” in “Praise to the Man”: Fifteen Classic BYU Devotionals About the Prophet Joseph Smith, 1955–2005 (Brigham Young University, 2005), 151–67. Also published in BYU Studies 39, no. 1 (2000): 53–65.
B. H. Roberts, The Truth, The Way, The Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, ed. John W. Welch (1911; 2nd ed., BYU Studies, 1996), 334 for example. See also Truman Madsen, Eternal Man (Deseret Book, 1966), 55–56. Most Latter-day Saints who discuss the issue follow in Roberts’s and Madsen’s footsteps.
Miriam Attia, “Toward a More Compassionate Theodicy: The Promise of Joseph Smith’s Limited God,” Sunstone Symposium 2014.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; repr., Penguin Classics, 2006).
Paige Anderson’s Wayfare essay, “A Careful Mending of the World,” takes up this theme beautifully: Paige Anderson, “A Careful Mending of the World: The Creative Work of Hope,” Wayfare, April 12, 2025.
Gennaro Aulleta, “Providence,” in Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, ed. Jean-Yves Lacoste (Routledge, 2005), 1307–8.